Yeah, I know people “need” Nvidia but, I really wish people with the know-how would put some serious effort into making the deep learning stacks work well and easily on AMD cards: they may not be as fast, but AMD’s strategy is much more linux-friendly and it’d be nice for the FL/OSS community to work to make a Vega or Navi card easy to use for GPGPU.

Expending considerable effort to support each Linux release with Nvidia drivers is the opposite of being "purposefully hostile to Linux".

They shouldn't need to "support" any Linux "release" if they only published the specifications for their hardware like a civilized hardware vendor.

Like AMD, that only supports GL 3.3 on a GL 4.1 capable card?

For a few ten year old card models. Everything before and after supports whatever the HW can. Maybe it's time you let go of this grudge.

Maybe it is time to stop advocating open source drivers as something that benefits everyone.

Apparently old models get dropped just as with binary blobs, or maybe not, given that the Windows drivers work today just as 10 years ago with GL 4.1 and DX 11.

Well your hardware is from a time when AMD was still primarily pursuing the binary fglrx driver - if your card had an open source driver back then it would still work. What got dropped is the proprietary driver, not functionality from the open source driver. And with r600g being open source, people (mainly Red Hat's Dave Airlie) have been adding to it - in particular, there is OpenGL 4 support for some cards now, just not for all yet.

Just because you are unhappy that your card was too old to be included in the current open source driver does not mean you have to spread FUD about it.

It is not FUD, rather the proof that having open source drivers don't translate to support.

If anything, it helped my decision to focus on Apple, Microsoft and Google platforms, and let go of "Year of Linux Desktop" mantra.